The Washington Stratagem (34 page)

Just as the first puff of gas escaped, Yael yanked her hijab down from her forehead with her right hand and pulled it over her mouth. She turned her head sharply rightward, down into her shoulder away from the gas, holding her breath.

Still holding her head scarf over her mouth, she jammed her foot against the bald man’s leg. She grabbed his sleeve with her left hand, using the momentum of his body weight to pull him toward her. He stumbled forward, unable to escape.

As Yael dropped back on her right foot, the fat man’s fist flew toward her, a flash of skin and metal. She released her head scarf and blocked his hand with her right arm, simul-taneously kicking out with her left leg at the tall man.

She aimed for the side of his knee, coughing. Most of the gas had dissipated but the fumes still caught in her throat, sapping her concentration. The move should have disabled him, but her foot slipped and hit his upper thigh instead. The blow was still enough to floor him. He collapsed onto the ground, grunting and swearing.

Yael jumped backward into a fighting stance, left leg forward, her hands up, now five yards away from the fat man.

The beggar girl scurried away to the corner of the doorway, crying in fear.

Yael’s vision narrowed.

The fat man jumped forward, lunging at Yael and slashing his fist through the air, as though trying to slice her open from shoulder to hip.

Yael jumped back, her head dropped down, shoulders raised, her forearms in front of her neck to protect herself.

Each time the fat man stepped toward her, Yael leapt away and kicked out at his groin, again and again. But despite his bulk, the fat man was surprisingly agile and dodged her blows.

The ambulance stopped by the side of the shop with the art nouveau façade, its siren still howling.

Yael bumped into two elderly French tourists. They scurried away as fast as they could. Yael righted herself instantly but the collision gave the fat man a half-second advantage.

He jumped aside, wheeled around, and hit Yael’s left shoulder with a left hook. The blow sent her reeling, shooting bolts of pain down her left side.

Yael staggered back. A crowd was forming around the fight. Several tourists were filming the scene on their smartphones. The tram had stopped a few yards away. A middle-aged Danish couple, oblivious to the chaos around them, were standing in front of the red and white wooden carriage, taking selfies. Two street urchins, boys around ten or eleven, wearing Arsenal soccer shirts, leapt off the tram and stood watching excitedly.

Yael barged past them and jumped onto the tram’s metal step.

“Hey,” said the Danish man, “you barged into my wife and now you are in my picture.”

The fat man walked toward Yael.

She willed the carriage to move.

Nothing happened.

“I’m talking to you,” said the Danish tourist, advancing on her. He was tall, nudging sixty, his blond hair now almost gray.

The fat man touched his earpiece. “Look over there,” he said to Yael.

The tram began to pull away.

Yael did as he bade.

The bald man had one of the street kids by the neck, the blade of a knife in his hand.

The fat man reached into his pocket and scattered several leaflets around.

He walked up to the ambulance and opened the door, still wearing the pointed brass knuckles. The Danish tourist saw the blade, quickly grabbed his wife, and walked away as fast as they could.

The fat man turned to Yael. “Coming?”

Yael stepped off the tram as it gathered speed. “Let him go and I will.”

Yael heard the fat man say something in Turkish.

The tall man looked up. He lifted his knife from the boy’s neck. He sprinted away as fast as he could.

The ambulance door opened.

Yael looked inside.

A man sat on the ambulance gurney, pointing a gun at her with one hand.

“Get in,” said Yusuf.

Clairborne sits at the café table, sipping a warm Coca-Cola, watching lines of Iraqi prisoners trudge toward the trucks taking them to the Kuwaiti border
.

The air is thick, stinking of burning gasoline, so hot it is almost unbreathable. A long plume of black smoke rises over the horizon. The soldiers’ fatigues are filthy, their faces exhausted, covered with grime
.

A young woman walks up to the prisoners and spits on the ground. The Iraqis turn away in shame. Clairborne looks up as a slim man with a neatly trimmed beard walks over, greets him, and sits down
.

“
Sobh bekheir
, good morning, Salim. Sorry I can’t be there with you. How’s the house?” asked Clairborne, peering at the computer monitor on his desk.

Salim Massoud was sitting at a Formica-covered table in a small, dark room, a tulip-shaped glass of tea in front of him.

“Sobh bekheir. Not as comfortable as Montreal. But we will manage.”

“Good. How long has it been since we last met? Six, seven years?”

“Baghdad seven years ago, and Kabul five years,” said Massoud.

Clairborne steepled his hands and rested his chin on his fingertips. It was three o’clock in the morning but he was wide awake and completely sober. He looked briefly at the photograph of his daughter on his desk, wondered what she was doing at midnight in San Francisco, forced himself to concentrate on his conversation.

He needed to focus. Without Salim Massoud there would be no Prometheus Group. Their relationship reached back more than thirty years. After the United States had pulled out of Vietnam, Clairborne had joined the CIA to train as a spy. His experience in the Phoenix program put him far ahead of the other recruits. He graduated from the Farm, the agency training school, at the top of his class and was sent to Tehran, undercover as the cultural attaché. Salim Massoud had been his liaison with SAVAK, the brutal Iranian secret police. Massoud penetrated the Islamic revolutionaries and passed on vital intelligence to Clairborne. In return Clairborne supplied Massoud with detailed satellite intelligence about the Iraqi military, which was preparing for war with Iran. Clairborne also opened a numbered Swiss bank account for Massoud where he made regular, substantial deposits.

In early 1979 Clairborne wrote a series of long, detailed reports to Langley, outlining what he had learned from Massoud: that the shah was doomed and would soon be replaced by Islamic fundamentalists. Cooperation and subtle support now for the revolutionaries would pay substantial dividends later when they took power. Clairborne, who had been present at the capture of the US embassy in Saigon four years earlier by the Vietcong, also recommended that the US embassy staff in Tehran be reduced to a bare minimum, including himself, with the rest evacuated immediately. All of Clairborne’s reports and recommendations were ignored.

Just as Massoud had predicted, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran in February 1979. In April the revolution erupted and the Islamic Republic was declared. On November 4, revolutionaries attacked the US embassy, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. Clairborne had stayed away from work that day. He fled overland to Turkey, on a route mapped out for him by Massoud, his guilt about abandoning his colleagues competing with an even stronger sense of self-preservation.

Clairborne’s connection to Massoud survived the embassy crisis. Despite all the Iranian denunciations of the “Great Satan,” back-channel links between Tehran and Washington were soon reestablished. Massoud, like many of his colleagues, made a seamless switch from SAVAK to the new Ministry of Intelligence and National Security, known as VEVAK, which was even more brutal than its predecessor. In 1980, the year after the revolution, Iran went to war with Iraq. The conflict lasted eight years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Throughout that time Clairborne continued to supply Massoud with satellite intelligence. In exchange Massoud gave Clairborne information on the inner workings and vicious power struggles inside the Islamic regime.

The two men met again in Kuwait City during the first Gulf War, in 1991, when the United States had liberated Kuwait from Saddam’s army. Massoud was in charge of VEVAK’s covert liaison with the CIA, and the Iranians had been happy to help the Americans and their Arab allies strike a blow against their greatest enemy. Since then Clairborne and Massoud had remained in contact, continuing to exchange information. A decade later, on September 12, 2001, Massoud reached out to Clairborne with an offer. Iran would help depose the Taliban in Afghanistan, in exchange for a resumption of diplomatic relations. Clairborne’s re-commendation, that Massoud’s offer be seriously considered, was ignored. The following month, weary of the bureaucratic infighting that had helped open his homeland to attack in the first place, Clairborne left the CIA and set up the Prometheus Group.

“Just three days to go, my old friend,” said Clairborne. Three days until Thursday, the start of the process that would lead to the rapture, a thought he did not articulate.

“Please update me as to where we are,” said Massoud.

“Pabst came to see me on Saturday morning. The plan worked perfectly, just as you said.”

Massoud smiled with pleasure. “What did he do?”

“Played on our shared history, then made a crude attempt at blackmail with a threat to go to the press with what he thinks he knows.”

“Which is?”

“Just what we loaded onto Jones’s mobile phone. Architectural details of the Osman Convention Center, the first and second wave of suicide bombers, timings, response protocols of the Turkish security forces—it’s all there, leading back to Prometheus. They had to work hard to get it, so they believe it.”

“So you are sure that he has no idea of the actual plan?”

Clairborne nodded. “Sure as a cat can climb up a tree.”

“However, he could still go public with what he has. Clarence, I know this man is an old comrade of yours, but—”

“Don’t worry, Salim. He won’t. Not yet. He and the girl will want more details, to find out what’s going on at the Turkish end, how it’s all been put together. They will keep digging for something that does not exist. Everything is under control.”

September 11, 2001, had been good for business. Clairborne had used his network of contacts across the US military and intelligence services to make the Prometheus Group the gateway to Kabul. Any American or foreign corporation wishing to supply services to the US government in Afghanistan, local governments, or even the legion of charities and nongovernmental organizations operating there, had to go through Prometheus. The firm’s clients included banks, corporations, oil and energy companies, and, of course, private military contractors. From Kabul to K Street, the equation was clear: the greater the chaos, the greater the profits. The Iraq War had brought the greatest rewards. When the Bush administration needed “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction to make the case for invading, Prometheus had helped provide—or manufacture—it. The hard part had been Clairborne’s years of work building up his network of contacts. Once in place, it was simple to use. A leak to a friendly European intelligence service that was soon rippling over the Atlantic; a quiet dinner in Georgetown with an influential journalist; a few carefully doctored intelligence reports; subtle nudges, nods, and winks at Langley and the Pentagon, and hey presto, shock and awe over Baghdad.

Prometheus’s turnover quickly reached seven figures a year, then eight and nine. The more Americans—and Iraqis and Afghans—that died, the more demand there was for the United States to prop up the shaky local bureaucracies, train their militaries and police forces, and supply the darker services needed to deal with the myriad of domestic militias and terrorist groups.

Within a few months, the Iraqi bonanza far outstripped that to be earned in Kabul. It was then that Clairborne crossed the line, one he had pledged to himself that he would never breach. Forewarned by Massoud of a terrorist attack on the UN complex in Baghdad—the same headquarters that Joe-Don demanded be properly secured, to no avail—Clairborne had kept quiet. Twenty-two UN staffers died.

The Prometheus Group’s takings soared even higher. Salim Massoud knew about the attack on the UN complex because he had helped organize it. By then Massoud was in charge of the Iranian military campaign in Iraq, providing arms, logistics, and training for the Shia fighters battling their Sunni enemies. After the Baghdad bombing it was a comparatively small step for Clairborne to suggest American and Western targets for Massoud’s militia. Each outrage brought more contracts for Prometheus’s clients and more profits for the firm. Massoud had encouraged taking this course of action to its logical conclusion. He had proposed that Prometheus set up a special black-operations unit to carry out joint attacks with Iranian Shia militants against US forces and installations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even Clairborne had balked at this—in part because it would give Massoud unwelcome leverage over him.

But Massoud’s proposal had planted a dark seed in Clairborne’s mind. Meanwhile, Clairborne’s payments to Massoud’s private account at Bank Bernard et Fils, and the one in the name of Nuristan Holdings, had made Massoud a very rich man.

“
Kheili khoob
, very good. Clarence…,” said Massoud, his voice suddenly hesitant. “Is there any news…?”

Clairborne shook his head. “I’m working on it, Salim, doing my best. I have lines out everywhere. But still nothing so far.”

Massoud’s face briefly twisted. “Clarence, isn’t there anything? Anything at all? With all your connections, there must be a way to find out.”

Clairborne looked somber. “I’m sorry, Salim. Since Snowden everything’s locked down tighter than a nun’s—” He quickly stopped himself. “There are new government agencies, so deep and so dark, even I have never heard of them. But I’m on the case, and once I hear anything, which should be soon, I will let you know.”

“And the girl?”

“The operation is under way, even as we speak.”

“Thank you, Clarence,” said Massoud.

Clairborne bade Massoud good-bye and closed the screen.

He pressed a series of keys. A new window opened on the monitor. It showed Farzad Massoud sitting on a bed in a gray-walled cell, staring blankly into space.